


Welcome Home In Good Spirits

by bibesties



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Gen, Its Kieren's POV, M/M, Sue and Simon are mentioned and not in it much, brief description of self harm and suicide and death, not overly graphic but still there!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 11:35:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4959094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibesties/pseuds/bibesties
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ren and Rick forever, that's how Kieren thought it would be.<br/>Instead he has to suffer through the loss of his best friend twice.</p><p>Kieren's thoughts through both of Rick's deaths and as he slowly moves on with his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome Home In Good Spirits

**Author's Note:**

> Hey hey! So I wrote this last time I watched In The Flesh over a year ago, and I was pretty heavily depressed at the time and a lot of Kieren's story line resonated with me. I picked it up again a couple of weeks back and have been editing it when I can ever since, working on a more hopeful ending as I've come a long way in the last year and this fic kind of reflects my changing feelings and coping with dark times too!
> 
> I really wanted to get into how he would feel having to go through so much pain and anguish, but still coming out of it and surviving and existing.
> 
> It's a little dark at first but does end on a positive note as he learns from his experiences and keeps on going.
> 
> I usually write funny stories, so this has been a fun experiment with writing a different genre altogether (thought I can't help it from being okay in the end, I don't want to make things too painful!). Hope you like it!
> 
> P.S. - Title is from a Keaton Henson song as I'm unoriginal, thought it fits well if you think of it being said sarcastically by Kieren.

he just got to that stage where you don’t think. 

you stop thinking, it’s too hard, too tiring, too much. you need it to end. he thinks of writing something, a goodbye, but he wouldn’t know where to begin, can’t be bothered to begin because there’s no end.

he gets so close to it, opening the cutlery draw in the kitchen, picking up a knife, but it’s not the right time. he thinks, ridiculously, if it’s the right shape. he’s thinking to much to go through with it. there’s people around, anyway. someone comes in, talking about something he doesn’t care about. 

he doesn’t bother, for today.

it seems pointless. but everything seems pointless anyway. and eventually it gets too much, the struggle to answer the question of why he should keep going, it gets unbearable. he’s tried. he’s tried so hard. but his pictures, his letters, him.

he finds himself thinking the most absurd things. begging an unknown entity to bring the photos to life, to send him replies to the letters he still writes. they’re shorter now. unanswerable questions, accounts of his day that are two sentences long. 

he doesn’t do much these days. just thinks, or doesn’t. looks for distractions when there are none. thinks about the past, writes letters to the past. they’re hard to read back to himself. he thinks he sounds so pitiful. he feels it, too. so pathetic, trying to live when he knows there’s no point anymore.

it’s too much. and not enough. nothing that stops the endless wonderings of what he’s even here for anymore. he walks. leaves the house and goes down into the forest. branches scrape his hands and face. it doesn’t matter. he feels numb.

he finds the clearing. the den. it doesn’t feel important, significant, it just is. he just is. ren and rick forever, he reads. it can’t be forever, not anymore. they’re just words. just a swiss army knife, light in his fingers. just dark red liquid, bleeding out of him. going through the paces like when the paintbrush in his hand follows the image in his head.

he has to leave. he can’t live with it anymore, can’t live with any of it.

he goes.

-

the second time around is different. 

feels the same. the same despair, the same sadness ripping him apart inside. but things aren’t repeating themselves, not really. 

under the surface of the thick layer of unstoppable anguish, he’s thinking. he feels anger, too, and not only at himself this time. he has so much anger, trying to burst out from him, with nowhere to go. he shouted before. he shouts again, screams, hears it echo. it doesn’t help, much.

he’s not retracing his steps, not really. he didn’t come here to die this time, he’s fairly sure of that. he doesn’t know why he came. he just needed to be here. his escape, although there’s nowhere in the world where he can escape his feelings.

it’s ridiculous how a place that holds so many good memories is also filled with the reminders of death. life bleeding out of him, the dark shadows inside the cave coming closer till he couldn’t see, or feel, or think. or live.

rick tried so hard. he needs to try for him. be himself like rick couldn’t. he can do that.

but there’s no point, a voice inside him is screaming. you have nowhere to go. it’s the same as before. but it _isn’t_ , he thinks back, waging a war in silence. he’s questioning himself, putting up a fight. that’s good, he thinks, surely. it is different, he’s undead, for one. making jokes must be good too, he adds.

maybe being undead means something, maybe they were brought back for a reason, weren’t meant to be dead. but even as he thinks it, it sounds like bullshit. he couldn’t stop it from happening a second time around, either. what was the point in being brought back to suffer through this all over again?

maybe there’s more. maybe he gets to see what happens, when he chooses to live. but can it be that different, really? he’s stuck in roarton. he’s on his own again. even amy has left. just him, with his hands that don’t look like his hands, his eyes that still see things the same way, even after going through death. still looking towards an escape, still not sure why exactly he’s bothering to do anything.

someone else is in the cave. he freezes, thinks of holding his breath, realises that’s impossible now. so many new things to still get used to, and so much loss to go through again. it’s frightening.

it’s his mum. in the shock of hearing someone, the negative thoughts had gone, just for a bit. he had other things on his mind, for once. he was worried. he’d cared, about what had been out there. maybe he’d even cared if it had been coming to get him, and if he’d wanted it to succeed or not.

he can’t stop thinking about her, his mum. he feels like he’s only just started seeing her again. realising there’s so much more to people than what they show. he thinks about how he’d feel if his mum decided to kill herself now. he can’t put the feelings into words. he’s just feeling. he can’t believe she’d ever want to do such a thing to herself. he thinks of the things there are to live for. he thinks of his family.

he realises this is how they must have felt. his family. finding him. finding out what he’d done to himself. thinking of all the things he could have lived for. thinking of how horrible it would be to lose someone you love so much. thinking of how you have lost them. how they aren’t coming back. how they’ve left things behind, so many things.

he is still anchored to life. to a meaning to live. he has his mum, his dad, jem. amy, out there somewhere. living. living even though they’ve gone through so much themselves. he isn’t all that lost. he’s still tied to them. 

last time, he realises, they’d been there still, mum, dad, jem. but he’d let himself go. pushed himself away from the people who had been anchoring him to life through the turbulent sea of emotions he couldn’t deal with. he’d let them go. he’d gone.

they hadn’t. they were still here, even through everything that had happened. they’d lost someone too, lost him, and they stayed. they are still here. and so is he, somehow, inexplicably, living as much as he can be. bill is dead. things could be different. and he thinks he’ll stick around to find out. 

he has things to do. he has people who have so much to say to him, and he’ll let them this time. he won’t cut off their words, cut off their help as he breaks the strands holding him to life. he gets up. he leaves the den. he’ll hold onto life as much as he can.

the grief is still weighing heavily on his family, and he wants to help them with it. and they want to help him too, they always did, he just didn’t think about that. he just didn’t think. but now, now it can be different. 

he wishes it could’ve been different the first time, he could’ve talked to them, could’ve talked to rick more, maybe it could’ve been different, maybe he could’ve–

he can’t focus on the past. he has to force himself to think ahead, think about his family who’ve been through so much. himself, for going through it all again and still being here, and he hopes to god they can get through this. together.

he stays.

-

it doesn’t leave. 

the exhaustion from thinking, the wondering why he should bother. 

but it’s easier to keep at bay than before. he is getting through it himself. but he is also accepting help from people, listening to them. he should have done that before, he thinks. remembered how much he means to other people.

he has simon. simon, who is so strange, so different, so interesting. who he was never sure of, but now he knows he is sure of him. sure of his feelings for him. simon knows how it feels to not want to feel. he has someone he can talk to when things are feeling too much and not enough again.

simon can help him through it, or he gets through it alone, but he knows that simon is always there. waiting to do what he can to help. waiting to tell him things he never bothered to tell himself. and he wants to do the same in return, wants to offer help however he can. it works well, the thing happening between them.

he thinks about other people a lot more, notices things. he doesn’t think he was all that selfish before, though maybe he was. 

he was distracted with everything that was happening. and he had thought about other people, but now he notices things he didn’t before. sees things in a different way sometimes. 

sees how his dad feels, even when he doesn’t show it. sees when his mother watches him from across the room, as if checking he’s still there. sees when his sister is reaching out to him without words, and he reaches back, this time. he reaches out to people.

he lies in bed, thinking to himself how strange it is that he can feel more things now than when he was living. although he doesn’t mean it literally, the sheets still feel like they’re several thick layers of nothing underneath him. he feels separate from everything, sometimes, finding it hard to feel in both senses of the word.

he thinks of how he accidentally saw simon getting changed today. he thinks of simon’s knees. how they are unfamiliar to him, but he thinks of how he’s quite sure they will become familiar soon. he thinks it’s odd to be thinking about knees, but there are worse things he could be thinking of, things he rarely even considers anymore. thoughts that are easier to ignore.

simon’s hands are already familiar to him. he can remember the shape of his nails and his knuckles. he wonders when thinking about somebody’s hands started to make him smile. they are slowly learning more about each other, sinking into the presence of one another. getting used to each other and their second lives.

he thinks he will lose the feeling of wanting to escape everything. he doesn’t know, but he feels like his body might be getting ready for it. preparing him to think about continuing his existence instead. he reached this point himself, he thinks. he got through a lot of things, and now he’s here. and he still has the people who have helped him get here. 

they’ve never left him once, and he wants to be there for them to. reassuring them by still being alive.

he’s living.

**Author's Note:**

> "We don't develop courage by being happy every day. We develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity."
> 
> \- Barbara de Angelis


End file.
